Just what is Shared Value?

Posted on by Bart Doorneweert

In December of 2010, just before the start of the World Economic Forum convention in Davos, professor Michael Porter released a much revered article in the Harvard Business Review, called Creating Shared Value, together with his partner in thought Mark Kramer. The article describes how a new form of capitalism is emerging where business looks at the possibilities it has in the core to leverage externalities for meeting social needs. The notion of Shared Value is contrary to CSR, which Porter considers as a peripheral activity to what firms actually do.

The release of the Shared Value article was well timed for the Davos convention, and turned it into the talk of the town. But, with all the ruckus of promoting the Shared Value concept, the oblique nature of the article’s main contention -that Shared Value is a markedly distinguished concept and deserves meme-status as a new form of capitalism- remained unchallenged.

The concept of Shared Value as described in the article needs more clarification. Because of the lack of clarity, the article actually unintentionally distorts the quest for achieving fundamental forms of  shared value creation. Before I get to what I think would more clearly describe Shared Value creation and highlight the challenges to create it, let’s first have a look at Porter’s take.

Porter’s take on Shared Value creation
The problem with capitalism at the moment is that firms are to narrowly focused on creating monetary profit. Under this condition, firms focus primarily on their segment in the value chain, and don’t consider the implications of their operations in relation to wider social needs. Each enterprise active in the value chain is very much its’ own island, focussed on itself, and negative social and environmental externalities remain unaddressed.

The way current capitalism works. Every company in the value chain (producer/intermediary/brand in simple form) on its’ own island, and negative social and environmental externalities remain unaddressed. Value flows upward only

Professor Porter suggests that firms have three ways of  Shared Value creation opportunities to overcome this situation:

[…] by reconceiving products and markets, redefining productivity in the value chain, and building supportive industry clusters at the company’s locations.

Regarding the first point, Porter ascribes the Shared Value label to a number of phenomena which would actually better be described as good old fashioned cost reduction, like reducing carbon emissions by increasing fuel efficiency, or slowing the rate of growth of landfills by reducing the amount of packaging. These are quite clearly not examples of Shared Value creation, but rather an internal process to the firm for increasing resource-use efficiency.

The conceptual treatment of Shared Value becomes more interesting when Porter arrives at his area of core research expertise, namely that of the cluster and the operations of firm value chains, which create competitive advantage. Porter explains the need for investing in suppliers to increase their performance and value delivery capacity to buyers and brands:

“Why are farmers poor? Because they have lousy yields. Because the quality isn’t good enough, and therefore the prices are very low.” – Michael Porter said in a debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos

And it is precisely at this point that the obliqueness of Porter’s take on Shared Value is revealed. To what extent is creating Shared Value, like investing in suppliers, about creating positive externalities in firm value chains which upgrade production, and to which extent is it about novel ways of sharing (distributing) the total value created over the value chain community? Porter appears to be clear on this:

“Shared value is not about “sharing” the value already created by firms—a redistribution approach. A shared value perspective, instead, focuses on improving growing techniques and strengthening the local cluster of supporting suppliers and other institutions in order to increase farmers’ efficiency, yields, product quality, and sustainability. This leads to a bigger pie of revenue and profits that benefits both farmers and the companies that buy from them”

Drawn out in a graph, I would suggest creating Shared Value looks somewhat like the graph below

Porter’s take on Shared Value creation. Each firm takes on to solve the negative externalities it produces. Some investment might be needed at the level of producers. This investment generally comes from public funding, but on rare occasions from other companies in the value chain. Value still flow upwards.

So the central thesis of Shared Value is that we do not look at systems for redividing the pie, but rather for ways of making the pie larger so that even the most under dealt pie eaters, can capture a bigger piece. I think, however, that this thesis won’t cut that pie, and here’s why.

What creating Shared Value should actually be tackling
There is an inherent flaw in Porter’s thesis, and I’m lucky to demonstrate it, as Porter makes his case, by looking through the lens of the agricultural value chain. Farmers are generally at the closing end of the value distribution and capturing process in value chains. They create a lot of the value, but due to their position in the value chain system, they always get dealt the piece of the pie that’s left after everyone else has taken their share. Companies situated more downstream in the value chain have more opportunity for capturing value in the market, and this suppresses farmers’ value capturing opportunities, putting them in a structurally precarious position. In effect, if the pie is enlarged under these conditions, chances are very likely that the relative share of groups like farmers will decline as a consequence, not increase.

I would argue that unless new forms of value distribution are developed, which can patch this precarious position due to lack of value capturing opportunity, farmers will always face the issue of not being adequately able to upgrade their production standards to more sustainable use of natural resources. Grave externalities will remain. Increasing productivity and yields might work in the short run, but in the long run this will not suffice.

I can vouch for this with the case of agriculture in my home country, The Netherlands. Although we have one of the world’s most efficient and productive agricultural sectors, farmers are struggling to invest in adapting their businesses to changing consumer and societal demands, and even to make a decent living, because of a lack of value capturing opportunities. Finding solutions is thus not all about the yield and quality. It’s about what kind of business models we can design in the value chain that will adequately distribute value according to the performance that is actually delivered by the producer.

The idea of fundamentally Shared Value
What needs to change about the way capitalism functions is the opportunities parties have to capture part of the total value created in their value chains. To provide this opportunity, we need to develop new value distribution mechanisms, which are able to equitably distribute value according to performance delivered by value chain members, regardless of whether this is product quality performance or social/environmental performance. These mechanisms could be for instance tradable environmental services, or producer participation in brand value creation with lead firms. There are all kinds of innovations we can experiment with to distribute this value.

If we succeed then the pie will most likely be divided differently, between parties in the value chain who have actually contributed to shared value creation. This will be a new form of capitalism, which breaks through the old issue of islands in the value chain, and connects communities that distribute value based on respective contribution, rather than ability to capture it. New capitalism is not about the size of the pie, it’s about fundamental Shared Value.

In the case of fundamental Shared Value, value flows differently: both upwards and downwards. Value is shared by parties who have contributed to creating it. This is the only way to sustainably deal with covering the costs of dealing with negative externalities in the value chain, regardless of whether the pie is large or small.

Design the Shared Value Chain
After this conceptual clarification, I can’t leave you without showing how Shared Value creation can be made operational. Interestingly, Porter’s article reveals what would be the way forward with the value chain of Nespresso as example  (as covered before on this blog, naturally):

“Africa and Latin America, who are trapped in a cycle of low productivity, poor quality, and environmental degradation that limits production volume. To address these issues, Nestlé redesigned procurement.”

Overall, this design process requires making new choices as Porter continues explaining

“New products and services that meet social needs or serve overlooked markets will require new value chain choices in areas such as production, marketing, and distribution.”

These choices will need to be made on the basis of fundamental understanding of the value chain community, and the business ecosystem in which it is embedded. Only this understanding will provide the new fabric with which more robust and sustainable form of capitalism can be created.

An inspiring example of this integrated thinking on value chain design is provided in the following presentation of designer Yves Béhar. In this presentation, Yves talks about the journeys he undertakes in designing new radically sustainable products (like the famous Cradle-to-Cradle Herman Miller chair). The presentation clearly shows that the design challenge we are facing to reinvent the capitalism in meeting societies needs, lies in finding new ways of value creation, capturing, AND distribution. Enjoy the process!

Post take-away points:

– Porter’s Shared Value creation is a thin rework of his previous more fundamental work on the relation between sustainability and core business.

– Value distribution is key to shared value creation. It is equally important to value creation and capturing. Share Value creation should encourage continuous innovation in those aspects of the chain where sustainability impact is created (in the case of agriculture, upstream!) Shared Value should warrant a system of economic distribution that is able to reward those that deliver on performance

– In order to find distributive mechanisms, we need to delve deep into the operations of the value chain. Design thinking approaches are needed to integrate product design with impact on social (business) system design.

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All quotes are from the Porter and Kramer’s Harvard Business Review article, Creating Shared Value (which is linked above), unless referenced otherwise

The clash of certification: mainstreaming sustainability through product labeling is ripe for disruption

Posted on by Bart Doorneweert

I’ve been critical on this blog on certification as a means to mainstream sustainability in production systems. And I can’t help myself: there are just so many naive and downright idealistic assumptions driving the uptake of certification at the moment, that it has lost much of its’ business sense. In this post I will show how the system of certification as we know it is ripe for disruption, and I will end with some alternatives from which I can see that they are working on upending the system of certificaiton as we know it.

Let me start off by running through the checklist of what product certification is at the moment and what the main assumptions on market mainstreaming are:

  1. Certification is a means for producers and product brands alike to verify claims they make of their product being responsibly produced. Third party auditing is used to independently verify the claims
  2. Certification is the mark you stick on the producer, the corresponding label is stuck on the product that comes from that producer. The consumer perceives the label, not the certificate
  3. The metrics behind certification are credible. They are mostly backed by scientific research. Scientific backing is more rigorous regarding environmental impact, because environmental metrics are more readily amenable to measurement than complex and fuzzy social processes
  4. There is a jungle of product labels out there, claiming to represent sustainably produced products. Each has its own focal interest, expressed through the issues which are incorporated in the label (like biodiversity, water use, carbon emissions, etc). Also, each has its own approach to raising the quality level of production in the market (some labeling schemes promote gradual progress on indicators like The Better Cotton Initiative, some set the bar high in an all or nothing approach like Organic certification)
  5. There are two methods currently applied to convincing producers to stick to sustainability standards. One is by sheer market power, by making standards a prerequisite for supplying. Competing firms downstream collude and impose a standard on the supplying market. The other is through what is called market development: you align big companies on a voluntary basis to voice demand for a certain voluntary sustainability scheme, and then on the other side of the market sponsor as many producers as you can to adopt the certificate, praying that this will be sufficient to reach a systems tipping point where everything is responsibly produced.

Now all these points above are variables to an equation, and that equation must solve the puzzle of mainstreaming sustainability. But the number of combinations and permutations an entrepreneur can make amongst these variables for organizing a sustainability mainstreaming trajectory are mind boggling, and downright confusing. As if running a business wasn’t hard enough in itself, now the entrepreneur needs to find some kind of meaningful balance between these variables to show to customers that a product is responsibly produced.

What sustainability message does this product communicate? Why do you need three labels? And why these three labels and not some other label?

Certification’s disruption ripeness
In view of this over complex problem, I propose that the main problem or barrier even to obtain any meaningful perspecitve on mainstreaming sustainability, is that certification has currently lost its focus on the job it needs to be doing. In its innovation trajectory so far, certification has been on the pathway of what Harvard professor Clay Christensen calls sustained innovation. Certification has been continuously extending its’ offer to the market by adding on new features like measurement methods, issues coverage, ways of obtaining and combining certificates, and levels of metrics applied.  We are even moving into a sphere of standardization in comparisson between certification schemes, where product life cycle methodologies are defined and actual products are metered on sustainability impact. This is most notably done at large scale through the work of the WalMart driven initiative called The Sustainabily Consortium. But, despite all the valiant intents and purposes, this road on sustained innovation has led the certification framework astray form the 2  main jobs it needs to be doing, namely to:

  1. help brands clearly communicate to customers that their products are responsibly produced
  2. help producers to compile new value propositions to their buyers, which can potentially command a premium in the market.

Certification as it currently is, does neither. In their competition amongst each other for consumer recognition and attention, product labeling organizations are at the same time competing with brand identity. I even heard Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman slip out during a seminar organized by the Guardian, that there is at some level a conflict between brands and certification, because there is a limit to what certification can communicate on sustainability and what the brand can communicate itself. This is particularly so for smaller and medium sized enterprises, who because of their size, operate on the basis of more close relations with their suppliers and buyers. They therefore know more about what needs to be done to achieve sustainability in their business system, than any certification scheme could possibly par.

As for producers, the value proposition of certification is very blurry and highly circumstantial. There are many opaque projections on the value of certification as for instance the one compiled by KPMG on certification in cocoa production in Ghana.

What will arise from the disruption rubble?
Of course the question is then what the alternatives would be that could disrupt the industry of certification. I see two trends that will achieve this, the first is simplicity of the mechanisms of certification. The second is refined market-based mechanisms that create a basis of consumer market adoption of sustainably produced products.

Regarding simplicity, the trend is best conveyed through pole and line fishing certification. This is a very concise way to communicate that fisherman are not depleting the ocean’s fauna with industrial fishing trawlers that scoop every living thing out of the ocean. The pole and line fishing certificate parsiminously communicates about the the probem and the purpose of the certificate, namely to counter over fishing by huge trawlers with individual fisherman holding poles with lines on them, lifting out their catch, one by one. This is easy for the consumer to understand, easy for the fishermen to adopt and (importantly) easy to inspect for the auditing agency. It is contrary to the more complex certificates, like organic, where a recent New York Times article explains that organic certification does not tell anything about conduct of the producer regarding sustainability.

Any questions on this product?

The point of consumer market adoption of a sustainability brings me to the Tip4Change venture, which I’m advising at the moment in seed phase. Tip4Change is a venture that does not impose a single standard on producers. Rather “Tip” attempts to create a market for the most responsible product, between consumers of sustainabe products and the producers behind the product. The idea is that consumers can reward what is in their opinion the best and most clear sustainability proposition by tipping the producers’ initiative (eg. community development programs, wildlife conservation, etc) at the till. This market intends to provide a clear selection mechanism for determining the stronger from the weaker sustainability propositions. At the same time producers can learn from the best initiatives, and take their shot a trumping the leaders. Brands can also leverage this, by actively profiling themselves with those producers whom they consider to be sailing the sustainability flagship.

In all, Tip4Change could provide a more simple, transparent, and less costly alternative to certification as we know it, with market uptake as a clear indicator of what works and what doesn’t. The “Tip” system intends to reveal those standards that are right at the level of what consumers can grasp regarding sustainable consumption. And “Tip” is not the only venture out there which is working on possible business models that can bind producers and consumers in this way; it has a couple of competitors! All an indication that certification’s disruption process is currently taking place.

So, what are the take-away points of this lengthy post on disruption of certification:
– certification as it is, is ready for disruption, because it is not doing the job that needs to be doing in mainstreaming sustainability, namely 1) communicating product responsibility and 2) providing producers with an option to substantiate their value proposition
– There are two driving factors that will create this disruption; 1) The market demands simplicity in the logic behind a sustainable product 2) Producers will be more supportive of and creative with a sustainability mainstreaming initiative which allows them to create and capture more value, opening up the window for mainstreaming